[ale] FreeBSD is Demonic

[George Allen]

So, for no good reason (I got sucked into it after running zfs-native
on Ubuntu for a while),

I'm on day-3 of a FreeBSD install, and it's finally getting annoying.

So - the early stages were thus:

1) I attempted to put the iso on my multi-boot thumbdrive with grub2.
This could/should/might have worked, except apparently it only works
with certain install images of FreeBSD 8, not 9. I got grub to load
the iso and the FreeBSD boot-loader, but the boot loader couldn't find
the kernel or the iso-loopbacked filesystem that grub should have
provided it. I gave up and burnt a DVD.

2) Setup ZFS root with all the sub-filesystems, raidz2, compression on
appropriate filesystems, etc.
http://www.aisecure.net/2011/11/28/root-zfs-freebsd9/ Works well, only
changed things to use raidz2 - equivalent to Raid6. +1 zfs-on-root

3) The sysinstall "think slackware package installer interface, with
the ease of use of dselect" wouldn't fetch packages. pkg_add -r <pkg>
worked fine though, as well as /usr/ports, and I was soon getting
additional packages installed.

4) Overall the documentation was good until I tried to install X and
the nvidia drivers. I have a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 285 which runs great
under linux. But it took no less than FIVE kernel rebuilds and a dozen
tries at xorg.conf to get the vendor nvidia drivers which require
linux emulation working.

I finally got flash working, but it won't go full-screen at all under
opengl (all black, although it's more smooth in a window), and
everything works under XRender, but in both cases it's much slower
than in linux.

I also noticed that glxgears will freeze for a split second when
moving the mouse between monitors, which I never noticed before.

It's been a while, since I used slackware, since I dug around in /etc
for *everything* but all is well except for figuring out how to get X
to perform. I think that may kill my interest in about 48-hours, but I
thought I'd give it a fair shot. I'd been upgrading a install of
Ubuntu for several years and figured it was time for a clean install,
and some distro experimentation in the mean time.